JOHN BOGERT: He was the last Victorian, a true gentleman, and my father-in-law

What came strangely to mind when I heard that my father-in-law, John Crisp Yellowley, died on Tuesday in Scotland at age 86 was the 1994 World Cup, the one they played in Pasadena.

It just seemed, in the immediate wake of the ailing patriarch's death by stroke, that our trip to one of those matches in the Rose Bowl said something meaningful and telling (or maybe just plain funny) about a man not quite of this time.

So picture a tall, handsome Englishman, a blue-eyed physician like somebody out of central casting. The son of a British Royal Air Force wing commander, he spent a Kiplingesque, golden childhood in Alexandria, Egypt, searching for Roman coins and swimming in an ancient body of water known as Cleopatra's Pool.

We jokingly called him the last Victorian.

Only it was no joke at all. He was the last Victorian. A self-contained, rarely emotional man, he believed in gentlemanly conduct, fair play and always paying cash. Classically educated throwback that he was, he understood the innermost workings and the Latin names of plants and animals and often wished aloud that he had become a botanist.

A true product of Edinburgh University's famous medical school, he was logic and reason incarnate. And he was truly of that old school, berating in his later years his own doctor, a young man who examined lab work without imparting the good believed to exist - since ancient times - in a physician's touch.

There were also instances when his antique views bumped hard against the modern era. As team physician, board member and director of his hometown's professional soccer club, Dunfermline Athletic, he would privately decry what he saw as the crass Americanization of soccer. To a man raised on the sanctity of amateur sports, no player could possibly be worth more than 6,000 pounds a year.

He had but one word for bloated team payrolls and outsized player egos: "Nonsense."

So there we were waiting for the appearance of some overpriced Argentinian and Mexican soccer muscle in a blazing, summer-afternoon Rose Bowl.

And I don't believe I ever saw him happier. Soccer was, you see, his god. Or what this man of science - this man who would die exactly as he wished, without much end-of-life nonsense - had in place of a god.

Without a doubt, there was his fantastic wife of 57 years, the sparkling and wonderful Elizabeth (or Betty, or, as the six grandkids call her, Nan).

But it was soccer that he enjoyed unencumbered as only a man could in what may well have been the last golden age of men. An age that happened to coincide with the last golden age of doctoring.

It was also his respite from middle-of-the-night house calls (they still do this in Britain) in freezing weather and from occasional medical silliness. Like the time the local police called him to inspect what turned out to be a mass grave full of 14th century plague victims unearthed in a farm field.

Speaking as a man who delivered babies, set bones and tended half a town (sometimes being stopped in foreign airports by patients shouting, "Hello, Dr. Yellowley!) during nearly 50 years of practice, he looked at the tangled, ancient mess and said, "They're dead."

It was endless. My mother-in-law for years ran his office out of the first-floor rooms of their vast, soot-blackened, 200-year-old sandstone home.

I was there on a day he walked in for lunch to hear her announcing that he had two calls. One concerned a sick child while the other was a woman reporting the death of her elderly father.

"I'll visit him last," dead-panned this man who remained unsentimental about death. A man who also enjoyed respite from soccer fan frenzy in his club's grim, exposed-to-the-horrific-Scottish-elements director's box.

Now, here he was in the Rose Bowl seated directly behind a row of painted, semi-naked Argentinian fans gone (literally) jumping-mad with anticipation.

Finally, having had enough of their view-blocking - and in an accent right out of a British drawing room drama - he politely asked one the South American nut jobs, "Would you chaps mind terribly taking your seats?"

The chaps stopped for a moment, looked at one another in disbelief, then resumed their frenzied bouncing.

"Do you want us to kill them? It would be no trouble at all," asked the two soft-spoken Mexico fans seated beside us.

"No, no," replied the good doctor. "Not just yet. But perhaps in a moment if it wouldn't be too much trouble."

Who knows, maybe that kind of understatement comes from being an English kid transplanted from warm Egypt to wild Scotland or from seeing his youth evaporate on Oct. 16, 1939, when he witnessed the first German air raid of World War II on the shipyard at Rosyth. Then there was his own risky wartime service in the Royal Navy, where he was known for sleeping with his eyes half open (a strange trait inherited by our son).

His drollness was always remarkable. On one visit the neighborhood grump shouted at him as he stood in our driveway: "Are you the gardener?"